Printstar
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Everything posted by Printstar
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I have a VME Galaxy graphics card from Mario Becroft circa 2000/2001 in my TT. This card was quite expensive new, but works great. However, Mario pretty much dropped off the face of the earth after a year or two of support. My guess is that a) there was close to no market for the card and b) the work involved in maintaining the drivers was too much. He never did finish the ethernet support to my knowledge. I have no beef with him, of course, and he designed a great product. If anyone wanted to start the project up again, Mario would probably part with the schematics and the source code for the FPGA and drivers if asked. But I think the production costs would be prohibitively high.
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I'd agree with that estimate. There are still quite a few that I'll plug in and play even though the graphics are a bit lame. I still love a good session of Attack of the Mutant Penguins, and that has no breathtaking graphics. On another note, I find it laughable that people blame Atari management for all the Jaguar's problems. I will admit that they did rush a lot of games out, and they were a bit naive, if anything. But you have to consider the size of Atari at the time. By 1993, when the Jaguar was first pushed out the door, their workforce was down well below 1000. I believe the old SEC filings placed them around 400 employees. Their assets at the time were around $35 million in cash and some change held in securities. They didn't even own a building at that point (just leases). Compare that with the original Playstation launch, which Sony dedicated $100 million in North American marketing alone, and you can see Atari had no hope. I remember most every video game magazine had Jag adds each month, and they were making lame attempts at commercials, although I don't think they ever could afford major network spots. So they made a desperate attempt at advertising. They would have been bankrupt in a month if they had gone all out with marketing. Also remember they were paying third parties to develop games and software. They were still attempting to operate a R&D department. They were attempting to provide full consumer support for the Jag and their dying line of computers. And they were attempting to launch a consumer-grade mass-marketed video game console. Personally, I'm shocked the Jaguar performed as well as it did. Atari was just too small and cash-strapped when they released the Jaguar to pull off any major video game market coup. But that's my opinion .
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Just registered on AtariAge (finally!). This looks like a still-active community! Anyway, here's my TT: * Atari TT030, 4MB STRAM, 64MB TTRAM (aixTT card), ROMport Ethernet Adapter, Galaxy VME graphics card, Wizztronics DEKA2 keyboard adapter, 8GB HD, Plextor CD burner I run a KGMD/Sparemint messy mix of MiNT with N.AES and Jinnee. The system is a bit slower than I'd like nowadays, but fast considering what I have it doing based on its age. Jinnee is possibly the best desktop user interface I've ever used! I don't use it much anymore because of the huge amount of space and AC plugs it requires, but, once I find a permanent place for it, I'll leave it set up and running.
